The Indigenous practice of agroforestry is having a renaissance as the global agricultural industry looks to reach net-zero emissions without sacrificing farmer livelihoods. One enterprise in Brazil is demonstrating how to scale this nature-based climate solution, which has the potential to sequester up to 10% of humanity’s annual carbon emissions and empower millions of smallholder farmers at the same time. 

On a sultry afternoon in Tomé-Açu, the agricultural heart of Brazil, farmer Zé Maria Pantoja strolls beneath the canopy of his 50-hectare agroforest. Tall, spindly açaí palms and hulking Brazil nut trees tower overhead, while fruit-laden cacao and cupuaçu bushes crowd the leaf-strewn ground below; the air thick with the scent of tropical plant growth and alive with bird chatter. 

It’s hard to imagine that three decades ago, this Garden of Eden was a dry, degraded plot of dying vines; a failing pepper monoculture owned by Zé Maria’s father. “My father thought it wouldn’t work,” Zé Maria recalls. “Pepper had to be pepper, cacao was cacao… It would never work to plant them together.” Zé Maria’s radical idea of replanting the farm as a diverse forest of crops seemed mad to his father; the consequent debate so heated that his father moved to live in the city so Zé Maria could get on with the work.

Today, the once barren wasteland is now a technicolour paradise of abundance; cacao pods, açaí berries, Brazil nuts, passion fruit and cassava all grow here. Instead of the annual pepper harvest, Zé Maria can now harvest different high-yielding crops year-round, which has doubled the farm’s production and income, and transformed his and his family’s life. Even his father has come around: “Today everything is fine. He agrees with it, and I know he is happy about it,” Zé Maria says proudly.

He has built an agroforestry system – the practice of integrating diverse trees and crops on the same land. The approach is as old as farming itself, with Indigenous peoples across the world practicing it since the dawn of the first agricultural revolution 12,000 years ago. But today the technique is having a renaissance, as modern science and industry catches up with traditional wisdom.

Agroforestry is now heralded as one of the leading responses to climate change. Trees are the world’s most effective climate protectors, and by blurring the line between farm and forest, agroforestry soaks up carbon, restores soils and boosts biodiversity – all while still producing food and income. Scaled up, the potential is massive: one recent study estimated that agroforestry could sequester up to 3.3 gigatons of carbon dioxide every year. That is roughly 10% of humanity’s annual CO2 emissions – more than the emissions of all the world’s cars. And for Brazil, 75% of whose emissions come from deforestation and land degradation, this natural solution takes on an added layer of significance. “People sometimes think it’s one or the other – agriculture or forest,” says Zé Maria. “They don’t understand it’s possible to combine the two.”

Importantly, Zé Maria was not alone in his endeavours. In recent years, he has partnered with  Belterra, a Brazilian agroforestry company set up in 2019. Building on Zé Maria’s early success setting up his agroforestry system, Belterra has provided him with technical support and quality seedlings to expand, and connected him to new markets; helping to prove that a family farm in the Amazon can be both profitable and ecologically sustainable.

It's this kind of work with farmers all across Brazil that has gained Belterra global recognition. In 2023, it was selected as an Earthshot Prize finalist for its innovative approach. “Organizations like ours are backing Belterra because it shows how to build a profitable company around forest restoration and farmer livelihoods,” explains Patrícia Daros, director of operations of Fundo Vale, a Brazilian development organisation created to generate positive socio-environmental impact, which has provided catalytic capital to Belterra since 2020. “That’s the kind of model we need for a just agricultural transition.”

Indeed, beyond Brazil and Belterra’s efforts, as the world grapples with feeding a growing population without deforesting the planet’s lungs, the practice of agroforestry – with its combination emissions reduction, co-creation, traditional knowledge, food security and farmer empowerment – could be the perfect just transition solution for countries where deforestation and forest degradation are primary sources of emissions. According to Marcelo Ferronato, president of Brazilian environmental NGO Ecoporé, “agroforestry is the best option the world has to support climate, the environment and farmers all at once.”

The problem: A broken rural model

Ironically, this clearcutting has come at the expense of productivity: about 63% of Brazil’s 160 million hectares of pastures are degraded - an area roughly the size of Egypt left infertile and overrun with weeds. But this creates a perverse incentive for the farmers, encouraging the felling of more untouched forest rather than the regeneration of the degraded land, cultivating a perpetual doom-loop of destruction. As a result, the mighty Amazon, once one of the world’s largest carbon sinks, has become a net emitter in recent years.

Recent interventions by Lula’s Government have succeeded in cutting deforestation in the Amazon in half, but Geraldo Wilson Fernandes, an ecologist and professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), points out that this has merely led to an increase in deforestation elsewhere in the country. The Cerrado region in the south, for instance, has since lost a million square miles of forest. “If we don’t protect other ecosystems in Brazil, we will still lose the Amazon,” he warns.

The social dynamics of this deforesting expansionism have been equally destructive. Brazil has one of the most unequal land distributions on earth: just 2.8% of landowners control over 56% of arable land, while the poorest 50% of small farms own only 2.5%.  With weak land registries, opportunists simply grab land by clearcutting it. And in the wild west, the strongest win out – in Brazil, these are the big agriculture and mining companies. Community and indigenous leaders who stand up against the inexorable expansion of plantations, cattle ranches or mines have faced threats, violence and even murder.

The smallholders who do persist are vulnerable. Incomes vary dramatically, but a typical family farmer with 20 hectares in the Amazon - such as Zé Maria when he first took over his father’s farm - earns under 20,000 Reais a year (roughly $3,700); less than minimum wage, barely enough to survive. “So he will perpetuate in poverty,” says Ferronato, noting that without alternatives a small producer will often look to deforest new areas in a desperate bid to keep up with the “latifundiários ” - large-scale landowners.

What began as the rational exploitation of abundant lands has turned into a fullblown environmental and social catastrophe. As one World Bank report warns, the economic losses from this unabated deforestation exceed the value of all the commodities gained.

But Brazil is just a leading example of a phenomenon occurring across the tropics, from the Congo Basin’s logged forests to Indonesia’s oil-palm scars and the cleared hillsides of Central America. Globally, agriculture – livestock and crops – has devoured roughly 50% of habitable land and left over one billion hectares of fields degraded. In its wake, cattle pasture, oil-palm and soya monocultures are driving 80% of deforestation worldwide. A recent UN report found that roughly 1.7 billion people are living in areas where crop yields are failing due to human-induced land degradation – “a pervasive and silent crisis that is undermining agricultural productivity and threatening ecosystem health worldwide.” At the same time, land ownership remains feudal: just 1% of farms control more than 70% of agricultural land globally, leaving millions of family farms struggling on the peripheries.

The solution: Agroforestry - an ancient solution with modern science

In its simplest form, Agroforestry is the practice of growing trees and crops together on the same land. It is an Indigenous system of agriculture that has found a new lease of life in recent years with the backing of modern science. In fact, millennia ago, ancient Amazonian societies are thought to have cultivated “forest gardens” by integrating palms and fruit trees with food crops, enriching the rainforest rather than clearcutting it in the name of farming. The practice is categorised as a form of ‘regenerative agriculture’ – farming that also restores natural ecosystems – and involves mixing woody perennials with crops or livestock in symbiotic arrangements in which each element supports the others.

Agroforestry offers what Saulo Franco de Souza, Brazil researcher at The Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF), describes as the perfect “middle ground” between conventional farming and wild reforestation. In practical terms, it involves growing complementary plants in vertical sequence that cover the tree canopy, shrubs and ground cover, as well as in varied rows: trees provide shade and wind protection for the crops below - and for the farmer working them - as well as preserve soil moisture. The roots of legumes fix nitrogen to nourish the soil. And fruit and timber trees provide sources of income to complement annual harvests. An effective agroforest offers yields all-year round and provides income resilience – if one crop fails, there are others to fall back on.

Through replacing monocultures with polycultures, agroforests look to imitate natural ecosystems. Research shows that they outperform monocultures on a variety of metrics: restoring soil health, conserving water and preserving biodiversity. Mixing plants also creates natural pest controls and prevents soil erosion better than single-crop farms.

Integrating trees into pasture and cropland also turns farms into carbon sinks. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) estimates that, if scaled up to its potential globally, agroforestry could sequester 1.8–4.1 gigatonnes of CO2 every year – which is roughly 4–10% of all humanity’s annual CO2 emissions.

And importantly – from a just transition perspective – agroforestry can also boost farmer livelihoods. Agroforestry can significantly increase yields: for example, integrating nitrogen-fixing Faidherbia trees into maize fields across Southern Africa helped 500,000 farmers increase their maize harvests by 200-300%. Similarly, trial sites in Zambia integrating Faidherbia albida trees yielded 88–190 percent more maize than sites without trees. And by diversifying what is grown on their land, farmers can create multiple income streams – including food, timber and other products – rather than be reliant on only one. In parts of East Africa, for example, adopting agroforestry contributes nearly 30% of total household income on average, significantly reducing local poverty levels.

Belterra’s model: Business meets regeneration

Belterra’s founder Valmir Ortega took a circuitous route to becoming a CEO. In the 2000s, he worked as an environmental official in Pará State, helping oversee an 85% drop in deforestation across the Amazon. But, despite the success, he foresaw a hole in the plan. “Once the criminality of deforestation was tackled, our next great challenge [was] providing an economic alternative that could enhance the sustainable use of the forest… as well as [its] restoration,” he recalls. Essentially, how could Brazil restore the millions of hectares of degraded land while supporting livelihoods? Believing this to be “Brazil’s greatest mission” he left Government in 2019 to found Belterra, an enterprise aiming to blend conservation and commerce to turn vast swathes of degraded farmland into productive agroforests. The idea was to “energise an economy at the forest floor,” as Ortega puts it, by empowering farmers to revolutionise the country’s approach to farming.

Organisations like Fundo Vale bought into Ortega’s vision, helping to seed-fund the start-up as part of the philanthropy’s forest restoration initiative. “Out of the 69 businesses we mapped, Belterra was one of the few we thought could scale into restoring many thousands of hectares,” recalls Patrícia Daros, Fundo Vale´s operations director. For the investor, Belterra stood out as it occupied a critical, missing link between farmers and markets in the agroforestry supply chain; was structurally aligned with long‑term, patient investment; and was a model that could be easily replicated.

With this backing, Ortega established two entities  in 2020: a private company, Belterra Agroflorestas, alongside a sister nonprofit, Belterra Institute. The private company would work with farms that offered the potential to turn a profit for both Belterra and the farmer, and the nonprofit would work with subsistence farmers – particularly those from Indigenous and Quilombola (historic communities of escaped enslaved people) origin – still too small to make any discernible margins. The aim was to create a sustainable business model out of agroforestry in Brazil that would encourage farmers to choose it over traditional grow-and-go farming practices; thereby serving as a “meeting point” between ecosystem regeneration and “generating impact on income [and] quality of life,” as Ortega puts it.

Although the agreements are established on a case-by-case basis, Belterra Agroflorestas works with farmers under two basic models: smallholder partnerships and landowner leases.

For the farmers who have a bit of land – like Zé Maria – the smallholder partnership model enables Belterra to set up a revenue-sharing agreement with the farmer. The farmer provides the land,labour and sometimes co-investment, and Belterra provides the capital and know-how – seedlings, inputs, training and market access. The profits are shared according to the proportion of each party’s investment. For instance, if the farmer chooses to pay 30% of the upfront costs, they will retain 30% of the future revenues. If they can only offer land and labour, Belterra covers the capital investment costs and leases the land from the farmer, ensuring the profits are fairly divided. Importantly, the farmer retains ownership of the land. “This is a transition co-created with farmers, not imposed on them,” Ortega stresses. Belterra’s agronomists will work with the farmer to decide on the best crop mix for the plot and help implement an agroforest that can start yielding profits within 1-2 years. For example, rows of cassava and banana can provide quick income, beneath emerging canopies of cacao, açaí and mahogany for longer-term yields.

In Belterra’s landowner leasing model, the company partners with landowners who have degraded pasture they are not using. This is a common phenomenon in Brazil, in which pasture is degraded so heavily by cattle grazing that it becomes unprofitable. So common that degraded land is often occupied by agrarian reform activists like the Landless Workers' Movement under the country’s “social function” law, which penalises unproductive estates. Instead of allowing the land to sit idle, the farmer can rent the land to Belterra., who will turn it into a productive agroforest and hand it back to the owner to run after a defined period, having made a profit from the produce in the meantime.

One example is the ITA Farm in the city of Santa Isabel do Pará. Once a cattle ranch, decades of extensive grazing had exhausted its soil. “It became unprofitable to have a 68-hectare ranch with the 10 animals it could sustain”, explains João Natan Tavares de Araújo, Belterra’s field manager at ITA Farm. The landowner leased the land to Belterra under a 12-year agreement, who have since planted a mix of fruit trees and hardwoods. The landowner earns lease income of 1,000 Reais a month (roughly USD $185), and will inherit a profitable farm at the end of the contract. It will take Belterra three years to get the agroforest fully productive, thereby leaving nine years of revenues from selling the produce to cover the set-up costs and turn a profit.

Meanwhile, local smallholders get jobs and training on the farm, often serving as “multipliers”. “We’re not just leaving a productive farm but also people who are trained… who can organically spread the work,” he adds, describing how former ranch hands are becoming agroforestry practitioners. 

But setting up these agroforests isn’t cheap: it requires an upfront investment of around USD USD $10,000 per hectare over the first three years – for seedlings, soil restoration and maintenance. To fund this, Belterra uses blended finance; a mix of philanthropic, public and private investment. The company has established an innovative financing vehicle to pool capital: grants and “catalytic” impact funds absorb initial risks, while private investors (including via a Rural Receivables Certificate) provide loans that expect returns over the long term. So far, this layered fund has raised over $60 million.

Typically, Belterra’s projects become cash-positive after three years, once early-yielding crops like fruits start producing. After ten years, a mature agroforest can generate income from harvests alone – far exceeding that of cattle ranches or soy monocultures. “A small producer who raises cattle might earn only 1,000 to 2,000 Reais per hectare per year,”(USD $185-$371) notes Ferronato. “In the same area, with agroforestry, he can achieve up to 10,000-12,000 reais – that is ten times more.”

Still, trees take years to bear fruit and agroforests can face a substantial “delay of the return”,  Ferronato warns. Belterra covers that shortfall by front-loading support and by intercropping fast-growing crops like cassava, corn and beans to provide food and income in the shorter term. “It’s no good if the system only becomes productive in year five – the farmer will abandon it,” Ortega explains. “The farmer needs food and income in year one.” 

Belterra’s also supplements these revenues by selling carbon credits. From the second year, each hectare of agroforest begins sequestering a substantial amount of carbon – on average136 tonnes of CO2 over 14 years in Belterra’s projects. Belterra aggregates and certifies these emissions reductions to sell as carbon credits, creating an extra income stream to help repay investors and reward farmers. Ortega insists that these “high-integrity” credits are the cherry on top of the cake, but the real cash flow comes from cacao, fruits, oils, timber and other agroforestry products.

Scaling with corporates: The supply chain shift

But Belterra isn’t only working from the bottom up. Large corporates are increasingly working with the company as they look to integrate agroforestry into their supply chains and climate strategies – bringing corporate finance and scale to the industry.

For instance, agribusiness behemoth Cargill is partnering with Belterra on a 1,000-hectare cacao agroforestry project in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso just south of Pará. The three-year project, funded by $6.4 million provided by Cargill and its bank, will fund the planting of one  million cacao trees alongside other crops. Cacao is the perfect crop for agroforestry, as it thrives in shade and enriches the soil – ideal for restoring degraded land. For Cargill, the project supports its target of restoring 100,000 hectares of degraded land in the country, but it will also boost its cacao production. Crucially, Cargill isn’t just paying for the trees to be planted, it will also buy the cacao produced by the project – guaranteeing the farmers secure and steady income. “We are participating as a financier…and we buy all this cacao to generate liquidity,” said Laerte Moraes, Cargill’s South America lead, at the project’s launch, noting that this guarantees short- and long-term earnings for producers. For its part, Belterra will work with the farmers to design, implement and harvest the agroforestry systems. 

Belterra has also previously worked with Brazilian cosmetics brand Natura, a global leader in sustainable sourcing, to scale a pioneering sustainable oil palm agroforestry project aimed at restoring 12,000 hectares across Pará. The ‘SAF Dendê’ project, which includes wide array partners, including CAMTA, an important agroforestry cooperative in the region, has already indicated to be more productive than traditional oil palm plantations and stores 50% more carbon in its soils. Supported by the Government of Pará, the project contributes to Natura’s goal of securing a deforestation-free source of palm oil for its cosmetics. 

Natura has committed to becoming a regenerative business by 2050: aiming for net-zero emissions  in its own facilities by 2030, eliminating deforestation of critical supply chains by 2030, and ensuring all packaging is reusable, recyclable, compostable or refillable by 2030. As part of these goals, the company has adopted an innovative ‘carbon insetting’ approach, which involves cutting emissions within its own supply chain – for instance, by planting trees on the farms that supply them – rather than paying others to offset emissions elsewhere.

For Natura, projects like SAF Dendê “costs less per carbon unit, and the farmers receive more than they would from a private carbon project on the market,” says João Teixeira, Natura’s climate action manager. Essentially, they’re just cutting out the middleman – and his take. The appeal goes beyond carbon: as climate extremes batter crops, agroforestry offers resilience against threats like drought. That buffer is priceless to a company like Natura, which depends on steady flows of Brazil nuts, andiroba oil and cupuaçu butter. An agroforest is far less likely to crash in a bad year. “Through agroforestry, it’s more certain we’ll have our ingredients for a long time,” says Bianca Marcuartú, a sustainability lead at Natura.

But perhaps Belterra’s most high-profile tie-up was a 2023 agreement with US e-commerce giant Amazon, which agreed to provide 90 million Reais (roughly $18 million USD) to fund agroforestry projects in Pará as part of its Climate Pledge to reach net-zero emissions by 2030. The initial three-year pilot phase will restore 3,000-hectares of degraded land by planting native trees alongside cash crops like cacao. The project currently works with roughly 1,000 producers across the state, with each hectare also sequestering an estimated 136 tons of CO2 over 14 years. Amazon plans to claim roughly 750,000 tons of high-quality carbon credits from the initial 3,000 hectares in 30 years – all certified under Verra’s new ABACUS standard, which Amazon helped develop to ensure “high integrity” forest carbon removal. “Agroforestry is right at the top of our list of scalable, catalytic climate solutions,” notes Jamey Mulligan, Amazon’s head of carbon neutralisation science & strategy, “because it puts trees back on the landscape and boosts livelihoods in ways that should sustain themselves even without carbon finance. It’s a nascent space that needs nurturing, like the solar industry pre-2008.” 

In the Acará municipality of Pará, the Amazon–Belterra partnership comes to life in the form of The Carbon Sequestration Producers Association, a collective of 16 farming families each managing their own agroforestry plots across a now verdant forest of açaí, cacao, andiroba and others. The Association aggregates these dispersed agroforests so that smallholders can access carbon finance collectively, without surrendering land, autonomy or crop choices. For Amazon, it offers scale and traceability; for the farmers, it offers bargaining power and a buffer against the long wait before trees mature. Carbon credits here are not the project’s centre of gravity, but a bridge – a way of paying farmers to stay with agroforestry long enough for food, timber and perennial crops to take over. “Alone, we are small,” explains farmer José Maria De Souza, as he shows us around his burgeoning agroforest. “Together, we are strong – and sustainable.” The head of the Association, Matuzalém Ferreira, adds “agroforestry is about learning to live with nature, not dominating it.” 

The appeal of the corporate partnerships is evident: the likes of Amazon, Cargill and Natura can provide the funding and technical capacity to properly scale up restoration, the guaranteed markets for the agroforestry products, and create jobs in rural areas as a result. The farmers get access to capital, training and stable buyers, making agroforestry a financially feasible alternative to cattle or soy - Belterra’s agroforests already generate ten times more income per hectare than soybeans and up to forty times more than cattle grazing. In return, these corporate giants receive an effective mechanism to secure their supply chains and climate pledges simultaneously. “The Belterra partnership really appealed as, when we look for climate solutions, we try to look for businesses that have sustainable business models that can really scale – rather than working with NGOs on a project-by-project basis,” says Mulligan. 

There are risks, however, that can come with these types of partnerships. Experts warn of a form of “carbon colonialism” that comes with offsets-driven deals that are geared more toward corporate net-zero pledges than local development, with a series of carbon-markets controversies over recent years  involving inaccurate carbon accounting and community exploitation attesting to these concerns. Belterra’s model attempts to counter this extractivism by always keeping the farmers at the center: the local landholders retain ownership of their land or share in profits, and the agroforestry plans are co-created with them.

People and places: The human impact

The transformation of Zé Maria’s land wasn’t instantaneous. But over the years, Zé Maria watched life return to the land. His trees now protect the soil, preserve water and bear him fruit. He produces his own fertiliser. He no longer burns. His farm has become, in his words, “a school” for the wider community. Visitors arrive regularly to learn from the maestro.

Belterra has partnered with Zé Maria for three years now. The company’s agricultural consultant Emanuel Oliveira smiles as he describes Zé Maria’s influence. “We’ve learnt so much from him; he’s like a professor to me. We pass on the lessons to other farmers, and we often bring them here to learn directly from him.”

Zé Maria is happy to pass on his wisdom. Just as he learnt from one of Tomé-Açu’s masters  of agroforestry many years ago, Michinori Konagano, a man the locals reverently refer to as the “sensei of the forest”.  Konagano is a Japanese-Brazilian agronomist and former president of CAMTA, an important agroforestry cooperative in the region.

CAMTA was founded in the 1920s by a diaspora of Japanese farmers fleeing a failing rice crop back home. They settled in Tomé-Açu and predominantly set up lucrative pepper monocultures. But after a series of disastrous harvests in the late 1960s, Konagano and others  started adapting historical Japanese agroforestry knowledge with the traditional practices of riverside farms of the local Amazonian people, along with modern soil analysis techniques, to create their own unique localised approach to agroforestry: the Tomé-Açu Agroforestry System - “SAFTA” in Portuguese. Today, CAMTA comprises 2,800 farmers – of both Japanese and Brazilian descent – and is credited as one of key foundations of the agroforestry renaissance in the country.

Aged nearly 80 now, Konagano embodies a lifetime of knowledge. When he first came to the Amazon, he recalls, the land was treated like an enemy to be conquered. Burning was normal. Clearing was survival. Agroforestry, he explains, emerged as a necessity.

“We planted and saw that when we combined certain species, they grew better,” he says. Today, his SAF encompasses a vast 280 hectares - nearly 700 acres or around 280 football fields.  An important supplier of seedlings for Belterra, it is the closest thing in Brazil to an industrial-scale agroforestry farm; brimming with passion fruit, cacao, Brazil nuts, açaí, timber trees, and many others, all growing in layered polyculture. He sees agroforestry not just as a technical solution, but as a philosophy. “You need to understand nature. If you understand it, you can live in harmony with it. The secret is care. You take care of the soil, it takes care of you.”

In Konagano’s view, sustainability is not just ecological or financial: it’s about ensuring that families have dignified, stable livelihoods across generations, with work and income – and, therefore, harvests – “12 months a year”. That’s why he prioritises sharing knowledge freely with students, family farmers, and Quilombola, Indigenous and riverside communities. For him, if farmers have skills, organisation (cooperatives) and access to knowledge, they can resist selling or leasing land to large agribusiness, stay on the land, and become the real engine of local economies. “The people are the sustainability,” he says, sitting in front of a large sign on his porch emblazoned with the words ‘Here, we all grow together’. “Knowledge should be free and I’ll teach anyone who wants to come learn – like Zé Maria did many years ago.”

Several hours drive north, in the Marajó archipelago – a landmass the size of Switzerland at the mouth of the Amazon on Brazil’s north coast – Belterra Institute is taking the same philosophy to one of the country’s poorest regions. Through the Marajó Resiliente project, Belterra Institute and its partners are helping subsistence farmers transition from slash-and-burn agriculture to regenerative agroforestry.

Just down the road, Rosivam Monteiro had done the same. Two years ago, he lost much of his pineapple harvest to a devastating drought. “I experienced how the climate was changing, and it made me realise that I needed to change,” he says. He trained with Belterra and in early 2025 he began implementing an agroforestry design combining a huge variety of crops – cassava, watermelon, pumpkin, beans, açaí, cupuaçu, acerola, banana, papaya, passion fruit, corn. Eight months on, he is already reaping the rewards from the watermelon and cassava harvests.

Rosivam is all in, even committing to agroecological farming practices to nourish his burgeoning agroforest. He has a small pond in his backyard, in which he farms fish. He uses fish excrement – high in ammonia – as fertilizer for the crops. “Everything is circular on the farm, all waste has a function – like in nature,” he says.

In fact, Rosivam and Erandir have also volunteered to become “multipliers” in the Marajó Resiliente project – peer educators who help neighbouring farmers learn and adopt the method. Marcos Lameira, one of Belterra’s field technician, calls this shift the most important part of the work. “We don’t just want to plant trees,” he says. “We want to change how people relate to the land.” The agroforestry plots, he explains, become sites of experimentation, cooperation and hope. “When a farmer starts to see their plot as a forest, everything changes.” That change, Marcos adds, must be collective. The model works best when knowledge is shared laterally: between neighbours, families and generations.

The numbers back him up. According to data gathered by Belterra and its project partners, early adopters in Marajó have seen a 30-50% decrease in the need to clear new land within just three years. Organic matter in soils has risen by up to 60% in test plots. Yields are stabilising, pests have declined, and household food diversity has increased. The forest – or at least a version of it – is returning, with all its attendant benefits.

What success looks like, and the challenges still to overcome

After just five years of start-up, Belterra has already achieved some impressive results. The company has so far turned 2,000 hectares of formerly degraded land across Brazil into productive, biodiverse agroforests. Belterra’s projects are also safeguarding 18,000 hectares of standing native forest – by integrating crop cultivation with forest conservation, these areas remain intact rather than cleared for monocultures. The climate impact is also significant: Belterra estimates that each hectare will sequester 250–300 tons of carbon over a 25–30 year cycle – equating to roughly 500,000-600,000 tons of carbon for Belterra’s existing projects. 

And importantly, this work is also having remarkable results for the livelihoods of participating farmers. In Belterra’s model, a farmer who used to earn virtually nothing on degraded land (often as low as $75 per hectare per year) can, after a decade of agroforestry, make  $7,000–$20,000 per hectare annually - much more than the Brazilian annual minimum wage of $3620. So far, roughly 80 smallholders have signed onto Belterra’s land-leasing partnerships, and around 200 more are receiving training or technical assistance in regenerative practices. The company has directly created over 300 full-time rural jobs, plus another 200 seasonal jobs during planting seasons.

Belterra’s business model has also received the stamp of approval from financial markets. The company has raised over $60 million from investors, and has commercialised more than 300,000 carbon credits in pilot operations. And at the end of 2025, the national development bank BNDES approved a R$100 million low-interest loan via Brazil’s Climate Fund to help Belterra expand agroforestry in four states, which will enable the restoration of an additional 2,750 hectares of pastureland by 2027 – projected to sequester about 850,000 tons of CO2 in the coming years.

Yet, despite its early success, Belterra – as with all agroforestry proponents around the world – face a number of key challenges to scaling its offering to its full potential. Challenges that, if not resolved, will curtail the whole agroforestry’s industry attempts to become a credible just transition solution in the fight to reach net-zero emissions. 

At the very basic level, there is the problem of shifting the mindsets of what is a predominantly conservative and traditional demographic in farmers. In Brazil, the average smallholder farmer is over 60 years old, and “teaching an old dog new tricks”, particularly a system that is as complex and diverse as agroforestry, is difficult for a group of workers with one eye on retirement, according to Ferronato. Experts stress the importance of outreach and knowledge sharing, in simplifying the language of agroforestry, and in demonstrating its benefits in practice. “We have to plant a seed in people’s minds,” says Belterra’s de Araújo. 

Then, these farmers also need the technical know-how and support to implement agroforestry systems. Agroforestry requires new skills in tree planting, pruning, soil management, and more – yet millions of smallholders lack access to technical assistance or training. Brazil has over 100 million hectares of degraded land, but farmers won’t adopt regenerative practices unless given the necessary advice, tools and seedlings. In Brazil, rural “extension services” – the provision of training, information and support to farmers and rural communities teaching new techniques, market strategies and resource management –  are woefully inadequate for this task, not least because of the remoteness of farmers in places like the Amazon. 

Labour intensity is another factor – maintaining diverse farms is harder work than managing a single crop. Government and NGOs need to step up their efforts, but “this is where Belterra’s leasing model could be very effective,” adds Pedro Ferro, an investment associate at SYSTEMIQ and investment manager at Partnerships For Forests (P4F) Latin America, a programme that aims at supporting initiatives from the private sector that protect forests and promote a sustainable land use.

Agroforestry systems also face high upfront costs and insufficient access to finance. Turning degraded pasture into an agroforestry requires significant upfront investment in things like seedlings, fertilisers, irrigation and labour, which cost up to $10,000 per hectare before they see any returns. Few smallholder farmers can afford this, and few banks see those farmers as creditworthy. Traditional farming loans have high interest rates and short grace periods, while a conventional  agroforest typically takes five to ten years to become profitable. If agroforestry is going to scale as an industry, patient capital like long term loans, blended finance and subsidies are needed to cover that funding gap. Belterra’s leasing model, and its ability to turn a much quicker profit on an agroforestry plot (in 1-2 years), offers significant potential here, but they can’t serve everyone. Blended finance innovations like the BNDES climate fund loan (a long-term, low-interest public loan de-risked by government and philanthropic guarantees) will be required throughout the industry, otherwise funders may shy away from the time horizons. “You have to promote agroforestry internally, as it takes a long time before you see the return on your investment,” says Natura’s Marcuartú.

There are also innate market and supply-chain barriers for agroforestry systems. Even if the farmers grow the commodities, they need the market and logistical infrastructure in place for them to sell these commodities. “Where is the industrial-scale market and supply chain for products like açaí, cupuaçu or even regenerative cacao?” Asks Campos. “Because it’s certainly there for cheap beef and monocultured soy or palm oil – which also benefit from widescale subsidies.” Natura is proving that these markets can be fostered, but a broader market demand will be required to absorb the future output if tens of thousands of hectares are restored.

But therein lies a paradox: açaí has recently become the latest “superfood” to hit the gentrified neighbourhoods of the world’s affluent cities, but Campos points out that the increased demand has even led to instances of deforestation in the Amazon to make way for açaí monocultures. “The innate extractivism of the free market is the elephant in the room here,” says Campos. So, simply creating the demand will not be enough unless it is coupled with effective regulation and standards to ensure diversity and forest protection. There must therefore be vigilance against greenwashing; companies buying from these projects must commit to genuine regenerative practices, and commodity supply chains need to be retooled to value ecosystem services and resilience over sheer volume. Initiatives like “catalytic procurement” – large buyers sourcing sustainable commodities – could help signal the market shift. But until those markets mature, agroforestry will have to compete with the drivers of heavily subsidised soy, beef and palm oil.

And perhaps the most significant dampener on the growth of the industry is the lack of favourable public policy or broader governmental support. Land tenure uncertainty is a particular problem in countries like Brazil, as smallholder farmers and traditional communities often lack the formal title to their land, which discourages them from making the long-term investment that agroforestry requires. Only 4% of Brazil’s 2,500 Quilombola communities have full land rights, leaving others vulnerable to land grabs or unable to access credit. Progress on land reform in the country has been notoriously slow. Meanwhile the country’s big agribusiness industry is so incestuously entwined in the political economy that it still benefits from billions of dollars of subsidies every year, while regenerative agriculture and forest restoration receive a modicum of the support. President Lula has attempted to rebalance these scales, reactivating the national Plan for Agroecology and Organic Production, for example. But he has struggled to “feed both hands,” as Campos puts it, of expanding conservation and restoration while also appeasing the Big Ag powerbrokers in Brasília.

Such political ambivalence has undercut key environmental initiatives. The annual global conference for governments to make progress on climate - COP - the 30th meeting of which took place in Belém at the end of 2025, notably failed to achieve a meaningful reference to deforestation in its final agreement. In the wake of COP30, the Government of Pará delayed the deadline for the introduction of tracking devices in its cattle herds,  a blow to environmental efforts to introduce a regional policy that advocates say is key in preventing deforestation. Another recent example was a proposal to turn a protected Amazon forest in Acará into a landfill: a private firm – backed by local officials – is aiming to clear 200 hectares of Quilombola-conserved forest for a waste dump. “We’ve asked Lula to intervene, and we’re going to take it to the Supreme Court,” says Acará councillor Iesley Vieira. “How can we have COP30 in this state while we simultaneously turn native forest into a landfill. It’s not coherent.”

The global picture: A just transition grows from the ground

The promise of agroforestry goes beyond just crops and carbon; it represents a nature- and farmer-based climate solution that bridges decarbonisation, biodiversity, food production, soil regeneration and livelihoods. But it will only achieve durability as a “just transition” if it empowers local communities and smallholder farmers while protecting forests. As TNC’s Susan Patton-Cook puts it, any climate transition for agriculture must improve the livelihoods of people on the ground, otherwise “why would farmers care about net zero at all?” As such, these solutions must be co-designed with farmers and tailored to local needs. In Brazil, agroforestry is seen as the “pinnacle of climate justice” as it increases farmer incomes ten-fold while restoring the land – but projects must be built on secure land tenure, shared power and genuine participation.

Incorporating all these principles, Belterra is now trying to evolve to bring them to a much larger group of farmers. It is pivoting from vertically managing all the systems itself to becoming an enabler and aggregator of agroforestry systems at landscape scale – focusing its efforts on system design, financial structuring and long-term sales contracts. The company will provide the support for smallholders farmers, cooperatives and other partners to implement the systems themselves. “We’re seeking to become a platform for cooperation and collaboration, sharing information and business models to build an ecosystem capable of transforming landscapes collectively,” says Ortega. His aim is to be able to scale the agroforestry industry sufficiently to restore “millions of hectares of degraded land” in a manner that is replaceable far beyond Brazil. In the short term, Belterra aims to restore 20,000 hectares in the next four years, with a longer-term ambition exceeding 40,000 hectares.

There is vast potential in scaling agroforestry across the world. In Brazil, the size of the agroforestry market is predicted to roughly double to $9.7 billion by 2032. Globally, there are currently around 1.2 billion people practicing some form of agroforestry on roughly 1 billion hectaresof land – from shade-grown coffee in Asia to alley-cropping in Africa. “We did a survey and found agroforestry systems in 83 countries, comprising over 1000 tree species and roughly 300 crops,” says TNC’s Cook-Patton. “There’s a lot of agroforestry out there and a lot of potential to expand.” Importantly, she stresses that success is “finding the right type of system suited to that context”. In other words, each system has to be tailored to the local environment – a multi-strata cacao-based forest garden that thrives in Pará might not work on the African savanna, and a windbreak or silvopasture in Europe looks very different from an Amazonian agroforest. 

Nonetheless, many believe agroforestry offers the most potential in tropical countries. “We don’t have enough solar radiation  in Europe to do something like this,” notes ThomasAbrell, a French agronomist on a learning visit to Zé Maria’s farm, “you have to be in a tropical region if you want to plant as diverse an agroforestry system.” By contrast, temperate farms might integrate trees in simpler ways, such as hedgerows, orchards or windbreaks. But as Abrell points out, Europe lacks shade-loving cash crops like cacao, and winter sunlight is limited. The sun-drenched, humid tropics, however, can sustain layers of canopy and year-round growth; which is why many believe agroforestry’s biggest wins are expected in Latin America, Africa and South Asia. “Agroforestry systems are a crucial transition solution for Brazil and other Global South countries, addressing land use, climate adaptation and rural development,” says Ortega. “Agroforestry systems have high greenhouse gas removal potential and offer a viable adaptation pathway for a hotter, drier planet.”

Across the tropics, concrete examples of agroforestry are fast emerging. In Southeast Asia, researchers found that the spread of agroforestry has measurably reduced deforestation by about 250,000 hectares per year, avoiding nearly 59 million tons of CO2 emissions annually. Indonesia, for example, this year launched a national programme to plant trees alongside rice and corn on 1.1 million hectares of degraded land. In Africa, Kenya recently unveiled a National Agroforestry Strategy (2025–2035), with plans to establish 5 million acres of new woodlots and mixed farms by 2035. In fact, African farmers have long practiced agroforestry through practices like ‘farmer-managed natural regeneration’. In Niger, for instance, the practice has re-greened over 5 million hectares of arid farmland, growing some 200 million trees and dramatically improving food security over the past 20 years.

Belterra’s experiences yield some important lessons for other agroforestry advocates looking to scale the practice as a systemic climate solution.

The first lesson is to “match agroforestry timelines with capital return timelines”, says Ortega. Growing a forest takes years, much longer than the typical investor payback periods. Innovative finance solutions like carbon credit advances and patient capital can bridge that funding gap. 

Second, change the incentive structure. Current agricultural markets and policies still favour monoculture commodities. If agroforestry is to flourish, governments need to introduce policies that reward restorative land practices rather than just punishing destructive ones.

Second, change the incentive structure. Current agricultural markets and policies still favour monoculture commodities. If agroforestry is to flourish, governments need to introduce policies that reward restorative land practices rather than just punishing destructive ones.

Third, foster a culture of diversity and patience. Switching from a monoculture mindset to an agroforestry one is as much a cultural change as a technical one. Farmers, governments and consumers all need to be educated to value diversity and long-term stewardship over short-term yield.

And finally, keep farmers at the core. Agroforestry can only scale if it serves the needs of the farmers and communities managing the land. “Smallholders, Indigenous peoples, and local communities are not just stakeholders – they’re rights-holders and protagonists,” says Saulo Franco de Souza of CIFOR-ICRAF. Their knowledge, needs and aspirations must guide project design, and benefits – from land titles to profit shares – must flow equitably.

No one represents such a just agricultural transition better than Zé Maria. From a dry, lifeless pepper monoculture a generation ago, his abundant agroforest now not only teems with life but also earns him enough income to send his daughter to college and even buy a small apartment in the city – opportunities his parents could hardly imagine. His success has inspired neighbours to adopt the same regenerative methods, creating a ripple of change. Yet Zé Maria is quick to credit those who taught him. He shares a parting lesson passed down from his mentor, Michinori Konagano: “Different types of plants should always be touching each other,  – just like the Japanese character for ‘people’. It’s all about connection and diversity.” And perhaps therein lies the secret: what is best for the planet is also best for its people.